Esophageal carcinoma is characterized by a widely ranged incidence variation among the different geographic regions. Anyang is a county in Henan Province of North China with the highest prevalence of esophageal carcinoma. Human papillomavirus (HPV) infection has been linked to the etiology of esophageal cancer in this area. In this study, we investigated correlations of the polymorphisms at low molecular weight polypeptide (LMP) and transporters with antigen processing (TAP) genes, with the risk of esophageal carcinoma. DNA extracted from either tumor specimens or esophageal epithelial cells was used to test HPV infection. Peripheral blood lymphocyte DNA was used for LMP/TAP genotyping. Polymerase chain reaction was performed to analyze HPV infection and LMP/TAP gene polymorphisms. The combined effect of LMP/TAP gene polymorphisms and HPV infection on esophageal carcinoma was analyzed by using unconditional logistic regression models. The TAP2 codons 379 isoleucine carriers and LMP7 codons 145 lysine carriers were found to be more susceptible to esophageal carcinoma (OR = 2.74, 95% CI = 1.15-6.49, P = 0.023 for TAP2; OR = 2.19, 95% CI = 1.09-4.37, P = 0.027 for LMP7). Patients carrying homozygous LMP7/TAP2 haplotype C, which contained the glutamine at LMP7 codons 145 and the isoleucine at TAP2 codons 379, were more prone to develop esophageal carcinoma (OR = 2.96, 95% CI = 1.13-7.81, P = 0.027). An additive effect on the risk of esophageal carcinoma development was found among individuals carrying LMP7/TAP2 haplotype C and infected by HPV (OR = 4.33, 95% CI = 2.53-7.42, P < 0.0001). LMP7/TAP2 haplotype C may act as the risk factor in esophageal carcinoma development and it may influence the tumorigenesis in HPV infected individuals.

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MMP9 expression is a negative, independent prognostic factor in ESCC and correlates with tumor cell differentiation, vessel permeation, and lymph node metastasis. MMP7, MMP9, and MMP13 may function in early stage ESCC, and their co-expression predicts poor outcome for relatively early stage ESCC patients.

The objective of this paper is to establish a complete characterization of tight frames, and particularly of orthonormal wavelets, for an arbitrary dilation factor a > 1, that are generated by a family of finitely many functions in L 2 := L 2 (R). This is a generalization of the fundamental work of G. Weiss and his colleagues who considered only integer dilations. As an application, we give an example of tight frames generated by one single L 2 function for an arbitrary dilation a > 1 that possess "good" time-frequency localization. As another application, we also show that there does not exist an orthonormal wavelet with good time-frequency localization when the dilation factor a > 1 is irrational such that a j remains irrational for any positive integer j . This answers a question in Daubechies' Ten Lectures book for almost all irrational dilation factors. Other applications include a generalization of the notion of s-elementary wavelets of Dai and Larson to s-elementary wavelet families with arbitrary dilation factors a > 1. Generalization to dual frames is also discussed in this paper.